opular impression that all existing languages
must be ultimately and somewhat rapidly smelted into one by the mere
heat and attrition of our intense modern international intercourse. Each
nationality is beginning to put forth its pretensions as the proper and
probable matrix of the new agglomerate, or philological pudding-stone,
which is vaguely expected to result. The English urge the commercial
supremacy of their tongue; the French the colloquial and courtly
character of theirs; the Germans the inherent energy and philosophical
adaptation of the German; the Spanish the wide territorial distribution
and the pompous euphony of that idiom; and so of the other
nationalities.

Both invention, which is the genius of adaptation, and the blending
influence of mere intercourse, may have their appropriate place as
auxiliaries, in the reconstruction of human speech, in accordance with
the exigencies of the new era which is dawning on the world; but there
is another and far more basic and important element, which may, and
perhaps we may say must, appear upon the stage, and enter into the
solution. This is the element of positive Scientific _Discovery_ in the
lingual domain. It may be found that every elementary sound of the human
voice is _inherently laden_ by _nature herself_ with a primitive
significance; that the small aggregate of these meanings is precisely
that handful of the Primitive Categories of all _Thought_ and all
_Being_ which the Philosophers, from Aristotle up to Kant, have so
industriously and painfully sought for. The germ of this idea was
incipiently and crudely struggling in the mind of the late
distinguished philologist, Dr. Charles Kreitser, formerly professor of
languages in the University of Virginia, and author of numerous valuable
articles in Appletons' 'Cyclopaedia;' the most learned man, doubtless,
that unfortunate Hungary has contributed to our American body of savans.
This element of discovery may, in the end, take the lead, and immensely
preponderate in importance over the other two factors already mentioned
as participating in the solution of a question of a planetary language.
The idea certainly has no intrinsic improbability, that the normal
language of mankind should be matter of discovery as the normal music of
the race has been already. There was an instinctual and spontaneous
development of music in advance of the time when science acted
reflectively upon the elements and reconstituted it in